Development is a key concept in Western culture and philosophy (cf. Nisbet 1969; Williams 1985) that figures in anthropology in two different ways.
In its broadest sense, the idea of ‘development’ was central to nineteenth-century social *evolutionism, which pictured human history as a unilinear developmental progression from †‘savage’ and †‘barbarian’ levels of social evolution toward the ‘civilized’ status represented by the modern West. From the mid-twentieth-century, the term has mostly referred to a more specifically economic process, generally understood to involve the expansion of production and *consumption and/ or rising standards of living, especially in the poor countries of the ‘Third World’. In this second sense, the term is especially associated with the international projects of planned social change set in motion in the years surrounding World War II, which gave birth to ‘development agencies’, ‘development projects’, and, ultimately, to ‘development studies’ and ‘development anthropology’. The two usages of the term are normally treated separately, but an understanding of how the concept of development has functioned in anthropology requires that the two be considered together, in their historical relation.
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